Tag: smoking cessation

The American Medical Association (AMA) has announced a new policy that will further strengthen its support of the regulatory oversight of e-cigarettes. The update is an extension of the organization’s existing policy, which calls for all e-cigarettes to be subject to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations that apply to cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products.

The AMA’s new policy calls for laws and regulations that would set the minimum legal age to buy e-cigarettes and e-liquids at 21; mandate child-resistant containers for e-liquids; and enforce laws against the sale of tobacco products to minors. The existing policy also seeks a ban on claims that e-cigarettes are effective tools for smoking cessation.

“Improving the health of the nation is AMA’s top priority, and we will continue to advocate for policies that help reduce the burden of preventable diseases like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, both of which can be linked to smoking,” said AMA president Robert M. Wah.

A new study has found that behavioral intervention provided to U.S. prison inmates who smoked before going to jail substantially increased their ability to remain smoke-free after release, according to a report by MedPage Today.

Most prisons in the U.S. are tobacco-free, with about 60 percent having total tobacco bans for staff and inmates, so most people entering the prison system are forced into abstinence.

Despite this, about 97 percent of prisoners who were smokers on being sent to prison return to smoking almost immediately upon release.

But three weeks after release, participants assigned to the behavioral intervention, known as Working Inside for Smoking Elimination (WISE), were 4.4 times more likely to refrain from smoking than those in a control group, according to Jennifer G. Clarke, MD, and colleagues at the Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

In addition, in a multivariate analysis that controlled for factors such as age, ethnicity, and duration of smoking, the WISE participants were 6.6 times more likely to be smoke-free at three weeks, the researchers reported in their study, which was published online by JAMA Internal Medicine on April 8, that “forced smoking abstinence [was] not enough for smoking cessation.”